Ethical dilemma for Journalism 30 students

Please comment and take a stance on the issue of accepting any of these gifts or freebies as a reporter:

1. A business reporter is offered a free trip to Catalina Island for the weekend if she will write a story on the new bed & breakfast that the company just opened in Avalon. The trip includes a flight from Sacramento to Long Beach and a ferry ride to Catalina, accommodations for two for the weekend. What do you do?

2. A reporter is covering a job fair at the Sacramento Convention Center. Vendors are giving out pens, notebooks, candy and various goodies to encourage people to stop and talk. Everyone is given a raffle ticket when they arrive --- the reporter wins the new Flip Video, worth approximately $175. What do you accept, or reject?

3. You are the entertainment editor and you receive a huge shipment of promotional materials, including CDs, DVDs, T-shirts and posters from a company that wants you to review their new product. What do you do with all the free stuff?

Your assignment is to look over multiple ethics guidelines posted online for reporters and take a stand in the comment area of the blog.

Prof. Sylvia Fox

Senseless Media Mobbing

Is it wrong for the media to pray on those who are in misery? That's the big question that posed by Ed Wasserman of the Sacramento Bee. In days of school shootings, bridge disasters and mine cave-ins, is it right to focus on those most hurt by the events and basically live off their tragedy. It's an interesting topic. Now I want to know what you think.

--That's not a ridiculous question. Largescale, violent loss of life leaves hundreds of victims behind. Some have visible signs of injury, but all are torn and all are suffering. Their lives will never be what they were.

Yet the public is accustomed to thinking it's fine to summon these achingly vulnerable people, many of them bewildered and half-insane, to the microphone and the camera. Whatever their other needs, they first take part in the spectacle called news.

What if this is bad for them? Suppose the cameras and questions, the act of providing raw accounts of harrowing events whose full import they haven't begun to fathom, actually harms them -- and slows their recovery from trauma.

Moreover, suppose the media mob thwarts their community's overall response by preventing survivors from gathering privately to grieve and make sense of what has befallen them.
What prompts these speculations was a conference panel I attended last month in Washington that comprised reporters who worked the aftermath of last April's murders at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and their killer died.

Because a disaster site is basically a vast trauma center; just about every potential news source is injured, highly susceptible to further injury and probably shouldn't be talking to the media.

Because media mobbing may destroy the private space a community needs to gather itself quietly and tend to its wounds.

Handling those matters responsibly is impossible unless media agree to restrict their own access. Media pools are nothing new; journalists traditionally pool their efforts and accept feeds from one another when they must. If they can share when courtroom seats are limited, they can share to respect the needs of the grievously hurt.

A cardinal tenet of the ethics journalists subscribe to is minimizing harm. It's time that injunction took practical form in dealing with people who are already severely harmed.

Will you be my Facebook Friend?

The Canadian Broadcast Company is prohibiting its journalists from adding sources as “Facebook friends.” They are being told to not post any political leanings on their facebook profiles. There is a document given to journalists with the policy explained. In the document it states that being friends with a source on facebook may compromise your work and it may not be in your interest to say that you are a friend of a source. It also states that in reporting you do not want your conversations with a source to be out there for everyone to see. Also the CBC says that it will not accept facebook comments as quotes. The full policy is available upon request of the News and Current Affairs producer.

This brings up some questions. Should CBC be prohibiting their journalists from being friends with sources on facebook? Should this be an issue at all? Is it an invasion of privacy if the CBC does facebook checks on their employees? I feel that our friendship and our work are two separate things and this is a good thing to have in place.

I understand why it is not okay to use their comments as quotes especially without them knowing that you are quoting them. Journalists are supposed to be fair and honest in their reporting. If a journalist is using quotes off facebook, they would not be being honest and fair to the person they are quoting. Journalists are required to avoid undercover methods of gathering information, getting information such as quotes off of a website would lead to incredibility and would be unethical.

Another thing journalists should do is steer clear of associations and activities that may damage credibility. This means that they should not have any real connections with sources outside of working. They should not be talking to people they know for quotes because that could put a bias on their story. This creates incredibility. Being friends with a source could easily damage the credibility of a journalist.

I feel that what they are trying to accomplish makes sense but checking up on this will be pretty difficult. Maybe the employees just should not have facebook at all which would potentially solve this problem of who people are “friends” with. What they are really getting at is that there should still be a professional relationship between journalist and their sources. Using a website such as facebook would get in the way of this professional relationship. This could lead to incredibility because they already have a relationship with this person if they are their friend on facebook. It really takes away from the professional aspect of reporting. I think that CBC is right in doing what they are doing and more companies should look into this because with the spread of online websites like facebook and myspace, who knows what can happen.

Lawyer: Missing mayor was at clinic

Mayor Robert Levy of Atlantic City, NJ had been missing for almost two weeks after taking a sick leave. On Tuesday, October 9, 2007 his lawyer reported that he was in a Somerset County clinic being treated for substance abuse and mental health issues. Levy was already under scrutiny for lying on his account that he was a member of the Green Berets. Even further, this led to a federal investigation of whether he was embezzling money on the behalf that he was war veteran.

This story seems irrelevant to me as a young American. How many politicians are working in the government that commit the same acts as this man has? Politicians are humans and make mistakes as the common person does. To report on a disappearance of man just because he is a politician makes it seem as if the average person’s struggle is insignificant. I believe it was wrong for the reporter to investigate so deeply into another’s man’s life without justification. If anything, he should back off and let the man go to rehab, without media attention, and return to office healed. It’s obviously the mayor has psychological issues and needs medical attention. The medium reporting this story only urges more stress on the life of the mayor. This can be compared to the attention that a celebrity such as Lindsey Lohan receives. If we left her alone and let her heal without the extra attention and questioning maybe she would be normal.

Report on stories that are interesting and have purpose in the common person’s life. Maintain your credibility and do not use irrelevant facts from the past to bring a man down in the present. Especially, help the man when he is trying to help himself. Aim for positive influence.

CNN

Front Page or Op-Ed?

In late September, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, sparking a heated debate between pundits on the benefit (if any) of providing Ahmadinejad a platform from which to speak. The President of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger, opened with a speech laced with scathing commentary on Ahmadinejad, even stating that the Iranian President "exhibit[s] all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." The overall content of the Iranian President's speech ranged from his controversial stance on the Holocaust, to his refusal to rein in Iran's nuclear power programs. The President also made comments about Iran, at one point stating that there were no homosexuals in the country, and that women in Iran enjoy many freedoms and are treated equally.

On September 25th, the Sacramento Bee* ran a front page story on the speech, which extended to the back page. While the article itself was fair in presenting both sides of the speech as best as it could, what was included alongside the continuation of the article on the back page was a point of contention for this writer. In a separate column was a piece that examined the major comments or claims that Ahmadinejad made during the Columbia speech, and provided facts and data to either refute those claims or to show that Ahmadinejad wasn't being as upfront as he was portraying himself to be. While the article itself was accurate in providing evidence to the contrary of the President's claims, it seemed like it belonged in the Op-Ed section of the Bee, and not right next to a major story.

The fact that the Bee ran such a column providing a point and counter-point look at the speech is great. Would that they would use the same sort of scrutiny for our own leaders and politicians. However, the main article off of which this article was based did a well enough job in the first place to show that the Iranian President wasn't as forthcoming as he appeared to be and that he subscribed to views that just seemed nonsensical and rather ignorant of world history. Does running an additional piece like the one in the Bee serve in informing the reader in any way that the main article could not? Is doing so remaining objective? When one covers the speech of a leader from a country whose relationship with our own is best described as adversarial, it is this writers opinion that maintaining objectivity and neutrality is of the utmost importance. Just report on the event and leave the point and counter-point style pieces for the Op-Ed, not the front page news.

*Note

The original article in the Bee could not be found online, nor could the accompanying article that provided a "fact check" on Ahmadinejad's claims and commentary. The link to the New York Times article contains roughly the same content as was found in the Bee article on the 25th of September.

Shield law must advance

When you are reporting the news, one of the last things that may be on your mind is whether or not you will be going to jail for the information you have discovered. As journalists, we need to seek out all the information that allows us to report an unbiased, fact-based story. To get these facts, we need reliable sources. Unfortunately, sometimes the sources and information we have, are also wanted by authorities. So in times where we need to keep our sources confidential and protect ourselves, what does a journalist do?

Within in the last year, two reporters were faced with prison time when they would not release their source who had given them information regarding the Bay Area Laboratoy Co-operative (BALCO) case. The journalists had cited testimonies that were given to a grand jury about problems of drug use in baseball. A Shield Law is currently in the hands of the government, waiting to be approved. This law would make it legal for journalists to keep their sources private. It would further support the First Amendment's freedom of the press.

I think that the Shield Law is necessary for journalists. Journalists should be allowed to do their job without having to worry about the consequences of knowing information. As long as the information isn't harmful to national security or the public, journalists should be able to keep it confidential. If journalists were not allowed to keep sources private, no one would release information. The news would be kept quite because no one would want to get in trouble. Journalists should be able to report the facts and give all the information the public needs without compromising their sources. The SPJ code of ethics states that sources should be revealed when suitable for the situation.

SFGATE

Buck Fush

The media’s coverage of a college newspaper’s profane two-word editorial deserves more than a few curse words.

By Michael Roberts
Published: October 4, 2007
Denver Westword News

"I think it's been really disheartening," says J. David McSwane about press coverage that's swirled around the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the Colorado State University-based student newspaper he edits, since an opinion banner reading "FUCK BUSH" was printed in its September 21 edition. "As a journalist, I'm extremely frustrated."

He should be. On September 25, for example, Channel 4's late newscast led off with anchor Jim Benemann stating, "The editor at the student newspaper up at CSU says he will sue if he's fired." As McSwane, who recently turned twenty, pointed out in an item he affixed to the Collegian's website, he did no such thing, since he hadn't been interviewed for the piece. Indeed, the person doing the talking was McSwane's attorney David Lane, who enjoys delivering provocative declarations; in this situation, he proclaimed, "If I can make a case that the government is putting a gag in David McSwane's mouth, they're going to federal court."

Nonetheless, Channel 4 news director Tim Wieland isn't troubled that Benemann's intro cited McSwane rather than his counsel, saying, "I'm comfortable with that" — and neither does he think the station blundered by failing to mention in this report and numerous others that McSwane helped the CBS affiliate win a prestigious Peabody Award in April 2006 and worked at the outlet as a paid investigative producer (not just an intern). Full disclosure is typically deemed a journalistic necessity, yet Wieland maintains that staffers initially felt McSwane's previous association with the outlet wasn't "germane" to the Collegian brouhaha, and only decided that it might provide "context" in some instances after skipping over it during three full days of reporting.

Westword has a McSwane connection as well. In September 2005, the paper ran his feature "An Army of Anyone," which built upon the investigation that earned Channel 4 its Peabody: As a student journalist at Arvada West High School, McSwane posed as a pot-smoking dropout interested in joining the Army in order to document the dubious lengths to which recruiters were willing to go to get him into uniform. He was awarded with an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) prize for his high-school efforts and the Westword offering, which ran alongside a companion article written by yours truly that focused on recruiting in the wake of the scandal McSwane stirred. I also guested alongside McSwane on a KHOW talk-show segment hosted by Peter Boyles.

Is any of that germane? Damn right it is — because it gives news consumers the maximum amount of information, rather than treating them like children incapable of putting details into perspective. Then again, McSwane understands why Channel 4 took the tack it did. "Of course they're distancing themselves from me," he says. "If I was them, I'd distance myself from something like this, too."

McSwane and many of his Collegian colleagues set out to cause a commotion, albeit not as large a one as developed: "I didn't think it would go national," he admits. Too bad their concept was so clumsy. They were incensed about a September 17 incident in Florida in which disruptive college student Andrew Meyer was forcibly prevented from quizzing Massachusetts Senator John Kerry; a video of Meyer's "Don't tase me, bro!" plea to security officers quickly became a YouTube sensation. But after penning the ardent defense of free speech that appeared on the September 21 Collegian cover, they felt they should underline their point by exercising this right in the boldest way possible. Hence, the "FUCK BUSH" line, which McSwane says was intended as a "wake-up call" to students who passively accept the status quo instead of voicing their views, as college enrollees have in decades past.

Predictably, the decision to target George W. Bush, who was only peripherally related to the Florida dust-up (Meyer wanted to know if Kerry and the president had been in Yale's Skull and Bones society), transformed the editorial into a culture-war blast of the sort that sucks up far too much of the media's attention these days. "Fuck Bush" bumperstickers have been around for years, and the profane part of the expression is extraordinarily commonplace in settings like college campuses. But that didn't stop CSU student Republicans such as student Chelsey Penoyer from taking advantage of this golden opportunity for attention-getting by organizing protests against McSwane and hitting the media circuit.

Penoyer turned up on Rush Limbaugh's syndicated radio show and local outlets such as Channel 4, where, on September 21, she made a series of statements that ranged from dunderheaded to disingenuous. When she saw the phrase in question, she said, her first thoughts were, "Is it legal to put in the paper? Profanity?" (Answer: Fuck yes.) She followed up that remark by insisting, "It doesn't even matter, the word after that. It could have been 'trees.'" Truth be told, CSU student Republicans would have only protested the line "FUCK TREES" had the president been a Republican named Mr. Trees. Still, Penoyer came off better than McSwane, who looked shell-shocked and tentative on screen. He sat for a slew of interviews on September 21 in the name of "transparency," but he says that after a Channel 4 package took a random remark out of context in a way that twisted its meaning, he changed his mind. "That was the moment I decided I wasn't going to talk to people anymore," he reveals.

He wasn't the only one at CSU keeping mum. On September 26, hours prior to a forum in front of the university's board of student communications that attracted hundreds of McSwane supporters and detractors, I visited the campus to participate in a long-planned panel discussion moderated by Collegian advisor Holly Wolcott and featuring Dr. Brian Ott, a CSU professor and communications-board member. Neither of them would comment on the McSwane contretemps, and when a question about it was raised near the end of the session by student Bobby Carson (editor of the Ram Republic, a conservative newspaper that's slated to launch this month as an alternative to the Collegian), my attempts to engage attendees on the subject were quickly shut down — as was the presentation as a whole. Oh, yeah: The topic of the discussion was radio blabber Don Imus, whose tale also touches upon issues of free speech.

The board meeting that evening was "overwhelmingly positive," in McSwane's view. He was caught off-guard by the level of support he received, and so was his mother, Shelly Hansen — which explains why she found the next day's coverage to be so lacking. She was dismayed that most news outlets said CSU Republicans had gathered over 500 signatures on a petition urging McSwane to step down but neglected to include the fact that student Kris Hite collected more than 700 signatures from those backing him. She also felt that outlets made it seem as if most speakers excoriated McSwane when the breakdown was actually nineteen pros versus just twelve cons.

An exception was an article by the Rocky Mountain News's John Ensslin that appears only on the tabloid's website. But space was found in the physical paper for "Student's Woes Not a Big Surprise," which juxtaposes a few nice remarks about McSwane courtesy of Hansen and Wieland with oodles of biting quotes from an array of former Collegian colleagues, who portrayed him as an arrogant fame-seeker. Take the comments of Collegian vet James Baetke, currently an intern for a branch of E.W. Scripps, the Rocky's owner. He said that McSwane wanted to incorporate information about the news-gathering process that he, Baetke and cohort Vimal Patel went through to complete a first-rate January-February series of reports about unlocked campus buildings as a way of "shining the spotlight on themselves," only to have other students veto the idea.

In reality, omitting at least one part of the backstory was a significant journalistic mistake that had negative repercussions down the road. Specifically, Patel and McSwane were caught by university police inside a campus building during the course of their reportage, and McSwane says the cops threatened to charge them and Baetke, who was found nearby, with burglary and trespassing. In the end, no charges were filed, but Patel, McSwane and Baetke served brief suspensions from the Collegian. This information should have been made public, and it was — but not by the Collegian. It formed the basis of an embarrassing February 2 piece in the Coloradoan, a Fort Collins daily.

Not that the Coloradoan got off scot-free in the mortification department. JP Eichmiller, the author of the Coloradoan article, used to work at the Collegian, and Coloradoan editor Robert Moore says he subsequently learned that "there was some antagonism" between the parties. This bad blood boiled over after Collegian types called the Coloradoan to complain about Eichmiller having been given the assignment. Moore confirms that Eichmiller responded by leaving an angry phone message for then-Collegian editor Brandon Lowrey. The harangue, highlighted by the line, "I guess ruining everyone else's life isn't always what it's cracked up to be, is it?," was later reprinted it its entirety by the Rocky Mountain Chronicle, a Fort Collins weekly that needled the Coloradoan over the perceived conflict.

Moore acknowledges that Eichmiller probably shouldn't have been on the earlier story, and when a Collegian staffer complained about letting Hallie Woods, another onetime staffer on the college paper, report about the present controversy for the Coloradoan, he removed her, too. (Woods says she worked with McSwane only briefly and didn't have a negative history with him.) But Moore, who misspelled McSwane's name in one piece he wrote, doesn't want anyone to see this last move as a concession that the Coloradoan erred. "I think what's happening here is that some folks at the Collegian are trying to create a smokescreen," he argues. "It's a classic diversionary tactic. When you're under attack, divert attention elsewhere."

As for McSwane, he insists that he wants the media to focus on free speech, not him. "This story's turned into 'Here's this kid who used the F-word. He's either the ballsiest kid in the world or the dumbest,'" he says. "But what really happened is, the editorial board felt passionately that we needed to get students thinking — and I agreed with them. So we did what we did, and now my ass is on the line."

Since the editorial's publication, the Collegian has reportedly lost plenty of advertising, although it's unclear how much. Figures ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 have been bandied about, but pinning down the actual sum is complicated by such factors as a dispute over actions related to the CSU Bookstore. A Coloradoan article about the September 26 forum quoted Pam Jackson, described as a technical journalism instructor, complaining about the bookstore yanking its ads over the "FUCK BUSH" ruckus, and McSwane says he, too, understood that the bookstore withdrew support that's rumored to be in the neighborhood of $20,000 per annum, only to return to the fold at a later date. If that happened, the act smacks of stealthy institutional punishment meted out before an official determination of wrongdoing. But in an e-mail, CSU spokeswoman Dell Rae Moellenberg writes that "to the best of our knowledge, no university businesses have made a decision to pull advertising," and stresses that a bookstore ad was part of the October 1 Collegian.

Whatever the case, McSwane says he and some staffers have received pay cuts, and on September 24, bloggers such as Jason Moses were told by the Collegian's web editor, Whitney Faulconer, that their positions had been slashed because of shortfalls. (A September 25 Rocky Mountain News article referenced another blogger who shared an identical account.) But according to McSwane, the bloggers' cuts had been in the works for weeks, and in an e-mail, Moses writes that Faulconer belatedly told him, "McSwane was going to lay us off soon regardless of whether or not the Bush editorial ran."

Right now, it's unclear whether McSwane will follow Moses out the door; the CSU communications board has scheduled an October 4 hearing to determine his future at the Collegian.But Dr. Horace Newcombe, director of the Peabody Awards program, which is attached to the University of Georgia, doesn't see the hullabaloo as a professional death sentence. "Student journalists occasionally take an opportunity to be provocative," he says. "I don't know that this will be any more significant for a long-term career than his earlier work. Certainly the Peabody association is on his resumé, and will always be."

Brant Houston, acting executive director of IRE, concurs. "I think his more significant work will eventually overshadow this particular controversy," he allows, adding, "Younger journalists learn all the time, and I would say David's learned something, too."

That's a fact — but McSwane continues to struggle with the lesson. When he's asked if the highly erratic quality of the coverage he's received has made him more or less likely to pursue the journalistic life, he says, "I don't know. I mean, I love journalism. There are so many opportunities to do so much good for people and to keep the powers-that-be accountable. It's a huge part of democracy. But at the same time, it's disgusting to see how some people have taken it for granted."

Is It Appropriate for Reporters to 'Lurk' in Online Chat Rooms?

Nowadays the Internet is a popular place for teens and young adults to join chat rooms or blog on a website. Many times these teens and young adults disclose information about themselves to others and become friends with complete strangers. With other people able to see the conversations the potential risk of their information leaving the chat room is likely.

What exactly is a lurker? According to the article a lurker is someone who joins a chat room to solely read the conversations of other members rather than actually participating in a conversation.

The problem arises when a reporter from a news source joins the chat room to obtain information without making themselves known and using the privileged information without the member or member’s knowledge. The ethical question being considered is if the reporter should notify the chat room of their presence and quote the conversation. In an example a reporter went in to a chat room for gay and lesbian teens. The reporter lied about her age to get into the chat room and then began to 'lurke'. What made this situation different is after being in the chat room for a while the reporter notified the chat room of her occupation and her reasoning behind being in the chat room. This situation can be considered both ethical and unethical.

I believe that being an invisible lurker is completely unethical. By not notifying the members of who you are and your reason for being in the chat room this violates the SPJ Code of Ethics. The Code of Ethics states, "Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story." By not identifying yourself as a reporter you are violating the Code of Ethics. As far as identifying yourself and making it known to the members what you purpose is that is completely ethical. The members now know there is a reporter in the chat room and that they may potentially use information from the conversations with consent. By making the members aware the reporter has allowed for the members to make the choice to continue to participate or leave the chat room.

I feel that you treat people the way you want to be treated. I know in my personal opinion I would notify anyone that I was participating in the conversation and my purpose for doing so.

Paige Kirchubel

To see this article, click http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1065048923.php